hi Charlene, welcome to our forum and thanks for starting with a one-minute test.

First of all, you have a clear and fluent way of reading, very nice, I like to listen to your voice. So that's already a major plus in audiobook-recordings.

On the technical side, we need a few tweaks though.

1) your volume is much too low. It's a bit under 80 dB and we need at least 86. We accept between 86 and 92 dB, with a preferred average of 89. This is easily corrected in Audacity though. Please apply the following step-by-step to your recording. Please don't re-record a new test, I'd rather you learnt the ropes of editing with your old file

2) your volume should be ok now but of course the background noise has been amplified by 10 dB as well now. So we need to clean that up. Please do the following:

> select a small portion where you don't speak (usually at the end of your file)
> go to Effect - Noise Cleaning
> first select Get Noise Profile
> then highlight the entire recording
> again Effect - Noise Cleaning
> now select OK

Now you should be all set. Could you please post the corrected file here in this same thread so I can have another listen ?

hi Charlene, welcome to our forum and thanks for starting with a one-minute test.

First of all, you have a clear and fluent way of reading, very nice, I like to listen to your voice. So that's already a major plus in audiobook-recordings.

On the technical side, we need a few tweaks though.

1) your volume is much too low. It's a bit under 80 dB and we need at least 86. We accept between 86 and 92 dB, with a preferred average of 89. This is easily corrected in Audacity though. Please apply the following step-by-step to your recording. Please don't re-record a new test, I'd rather you learnt the ropes of editing with your old file

2) your volume should be ok now but of course the background noise has been amplified by 10 dB as well now. So we need to clean that up. Please do the following:

> select a small portion where you don't speak (usually at the end of your file)
> go to Effect - Noise Cleaning
> first select Get Noise Profile
> then highlight the entire recording
> again Effect - Noise Cleaning
> now select OK

Now you should be all set. Could you please post the corrected file here in this same thread so I can have another listen ?